Hopes

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Hopelessness and the end of hope produce the same silence and are opposite conditions.

The structure

Three individuals, each defined by what does or does not occur to them on hearing a particular piece of news. The hopeless person hears that someone has been made king and it never occurs to them to wonder when their own turn will come. The hopeful person hears it and does wonder. The person who has done away with hope hears it and does not wonder — because they have already been crowned.

So the first and third are behaviorally identical and causally opposite. One does not hope because it is unimaginable; the other does not hope because it is finished. That is a genuinely acute observation and it survives entirely intact into the second half, where the news is that a certain mendicant has realized freedom.

The three among mendicants are: the unethical person, of bad qualities, “rotten inside, festering, and depraved,” to whom it never occurs that they might be freed; the ethical person, to whom it does occur; and the perfected one, to whom it does not, because the former hope they had to be freed has now died down.

The caste and disability passage

The illustration of the hopeless layperson is the difficult part, and it should be read rather than summarized. The person is born into a low family — corpse-workers, bamboo-workers, hunters, chariot-makers, scavengers — poor, with little food, where life is tough. And then: ugly, deformed, sickly, one-eyed, crippled, lame, or half-paralyzed, without food, clothing, or shelter.

There is no version of this that a modern reader will find comfortable, and the honest things to say about it are limited but real. First, what the passage is doing structurally: it is constructing the most extreme case of social impossibility available to its audience, in order to make vivid a state of mind — the state in which a certain future does not present itself as a possibility at all. The disability terms are there for the same reason as the poverty terms, as intensifiers.

Second, what that does not excuse: the passage treats birth and bodily condition as self-evidently marking a person as beyond hope, and it does so without comment. That is a view about caste and about disabled people, and it is in the text. A reader who finds it objectionable is not misreading it.

Third, what the same canon does elsewhere, which is not a defense but is part of an accurate picture. The Buddha is repeatedly shown rejecting birth as a determinant of worth, ordaining people from exactly these occupations, and telling brahmins that one is not noble by birth but by conduct. Upāli, on whom the entire monastic law depends, is remembered as a barber. The second half of this very discourse relocates hopelessness from birth to conduct: among mendicants, the hopeless person is hopeless because they are corrupt, not because of how they were born.

That last point is the most useful thing to teach here. The discourse’s two halves do not use the same criterion, and the shift from the first to the second is a shift from a social fact to a moral one.

The chariot-maker

One detail in the list of low families is worth pointing out because of what happens two discourses later. Rathakāra, chariot-maker, is named here among the occupations that mark a hopeless birth. AN 3.15 — which gives this whole chapter its name — is the story of a chariot-maker, and it ends with the Buddha saying I myself was the chariot-maker at that time.

The two passages sit four pages apart in the same chapter. Nothing in the text acknowledges the tension and it may well be accidental, since the Aṅguttara assembles material by number rather than by theme. But a reader who notices it has noticed something real, and pointing it out is a better use of a class than smoothing it over: the collection lists chariot-making among the marks of a hopeless birth, and then has the Buddha claim the trade as his own.

What “done away with hope” means

The third individual is vigatāsa, hope-departed, and the phrase for why is precise: the former hope they had to be freed has now died down. Not abandoned, not renounced — paṭippassaddhā, stilled, settled, calmed. The hope has not been given up as a fault. It has stopped because it has been satisfied.

That matters because Buddhism is often presented as recommending the abandonment of hope on the grounds that hope is a form of craving. This discourse does not do that. The hopeful mendicant is the ethical one, and hoping to be freed is what an ethical practitioner does. Hope ends when it is met, and its ending is not something to aim at separately from the thing hoped for.

Key terms